On Thu, 15 May 2008 10:24:00 -0700, brent3600
I have several comments, interspersed below.
The counsel about getting more RAM is very good - that will help.
Unlikely. He has 512MB of RAM (I assume that 520MB is a typo). Except
for those doing especially memory-hungry things like video-editing or
editing large graphics images, very few people running Windows XP need
or can make effective use of more than 512MB.
If he is currently using the page file significantly, more memory will
decrease or eliminate that usage, and improve his performance. If he
is not using the page file significantly, more memory will do nothing
for him. He should go to
http://billsway.com/notes_public/winxp_tweaks/ and download
WinXP-2K_Pagefile.zip and monitor your pagefile usage. That should
give him a good idea of whether more memory can help, and if so, how
much more.
Also be
sure you have plenty of disk space - the system needs it for swapping space,
virtual memory, etc.
There are at least five general sorts of things you should do to keep your
PC stable and running fast. This list is not comprehensive, and is in no
particular order.
1) Junk in your registry - Particularly if you install or uninstall a lot of
software, invalid keys build up in your registry and can slow things down.
An excellent free product to deal with this is CCleaner, from Piriform. An
even better product, not free but well worth it, is Registry Mechanic, from
PC Tools.
I completely and very strongly disagree. Registry cleaning programs
are *all* snake oil. Cleaning of the registry isn't needed and is
dangerous. Leave the registry alone and don't use any registry
cleaner. Despite what many people think, and what vendors of registry
cleaning software try to convince you of, having unused registry
entries doesn't really hurt you.
The risk of a serious problem caused by a registry cleaner erroneously
removing an entry you need is far greater than any potential benefit
it may have.
2) Fragmented hard disk - Think of your hard disk as being like a bookshelf.
When you look at it in Windows Explorer, it looks like each file is in one
piece, like a book on a shelf. In reality, the file management system
manages all of the "pages" of the books separately. The more you use your
hard disk to write and erase files, the more scattered the "pages" get, so
the hard disk has to work harder and harder to gather up the "book" you want.
Defragmenting your hard drive keeps the "pages" close together, more like a
bookshelf and less like a pile of paper. The
Windows Defragmenter is very good but takes a long time to run (overnight).
Degraggler from Piriform is free, fast, excellent, and allows you to
defragment one file at a time, if you want.
Fragmentation under Windows XP, if he's using NTFS, is much less of an
issue than it was in previous versions of Windows, and defragmenting
is unlikely to solve any performance problems. However there is
certainly no downside to defragmenting, and I don't disagree with your
recommendation to do this. I just caution him not to expect a giant
improvement by doing so.
3) Malware - Be sure you have anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-rootkit
software running and up-to-date, as well as a firewall. There are lots of
great alternatives in this area. I use TrendMicro. Malware can soak up lots
of bandwidth and cpu cycles, as well as jeopardizing your security.
I very strongly agree with this. Malware is becoming an
ever-increasing problem, and is very often the cause of performance
problems.
4) Crapware - All PCs come loaded up with software that make the PC seem
like a better deal, but which don't really add any value for you.
"Add/Remove Software" and/or CCleaner help get rid of this junk which takes
up disk space and spawns processes that suck up your cpu cycles.
I don't disagree here, except that it's important to distinguish
between such preloaded programs that start automatically when you
boot, and those that are just installed and are available for your use
if you actually run them.
The first sort is very likely to be a drain on performance (but even
here, not always. It depends on what the program is), but the second
type is not. The only disadvantage of having such programs installed
is that they use some disk space; on a typical modern machine with a
large hard drive, the amount of disk space involved is almost always
so small as to be inconsequential.
5) Unnecessary processes - Advanced users only. There are lots of processes
and services running in the background on your computer. Get rid of the
processes you don't need and free up the cpu cycles. This is a bit tricky.
It's more than "a bit tricky." For most users, it's downright
dangerous. Moreover the number of CPU cycles freed up is almost always
inconsequential. For almost everyone, I recommend against doing this.
Stop the wrong process & you can crash your PC or disable something you need.
Exactly! The risk of a serious problem is great and the potential
benefit is small. A poor bargain, in my view. I recommend leaving this
alone.
You can find and stop processes using Control Panel -> Administrative Tools
-> Services. I find Service Studio, from Mindswarm, quite helpful, and its
free. Not free, but well worth it, is The Ultimate Troubleshooter, from
AnswersThatWork.com. Also, ProcessQuickLink 2, from Uniblue, is free and
attaches to Task Manager, giving you a button to click by each process that
takes you to a website telling you what that process does and whether or not
you can kill it.
Also very helpful is Microsoft SysInternals Autoruns,
which shows you what is starting automatically when you boot Windows, and
allows you to disable things you don't need.
Disabling un-needed auto-starting programs is good to do, but I want
to add my regular caution here:
On each program you don't want to start automatically, check its
Options to see if it has the choice not to start (make sure you
actually choose the option not to run it, not just a "don't show icon"
option). Many can easily and best be stopped that way. If that doesn't
work, run MSCONFIG from the Start | Run line, and on the Startup tab,
uncheck the programs you don't want to start automatically. (Autoruns,
as you suggest, is also a good choice, but is unnecessary for most
users).
However, if I were you, I wouldn't do this just for the purpose of
running the minimum number of programs. Despite what many people tell
you, you should be concerned, not with how *many* of these programs
you run, but *which*. Some of them can hurt performance severely, but
others have no effect on performance.
Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you should do
is determine what each program is, what its value is to you, and what
the cost in performance is of its running all the time. You can get
more information about these at
http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html. If you can't find it there,
try google searches and ask about specifics here.
Once you have that information, you can make an intelligent informed
decision about what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of.
